“Let’s not wait until HALF the adults are obese until we do something”

A recent study reported that 4 out of every 10 women in the US are obese. So let’s not wait until half are obese. If we truly want to reverse this epidemic, we need to take action now. And the problem is our flawed fat-phobic and high-carb dietary advice.

Regular readers are used to me writing about that, but this time it’s the message of John Schoonbee, the Chief Medical Officer of the giant reinsurance company Swiss Re (the second largest reinsurer in the world, with yearly revenue of 33 billion USD).

More and more people see the problem:

I believe our flawed nutritional guidelines are driving this epidemic. Almost all increased weight stems from increased insulin as the root cause. Insulin tells our body to store fat. Chronically increased insulin is also the driver of pre-diabetes and diabetes. The last 4 decades of increasing obesity is I believe linked to chronic population-wide increased levels of insulin, which are linked to what we eat, and what we eat is linked to nutritional guidelines.

Three things are making a remedy difficult:

1) Fear of fat, 2) traditional food pyramid with an overweight carbohydrate base, and 3) the continued obsession with calories.

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